A comprehensive ontologies-based framework to support the retrofitting design of energy-efficient districts

As part of the Europe 2020 strategy, one of the challenges for the European construction sector is to reduce the energy footprint and CO2 emissions from new and renovated buildings. This interest is also fostered at a district scale with new technological solutions being developed to achieve more efficient designs. In response to this challenge, a web-based platform for district energy-efficient retrofitting design projects has been proposed in the context of OptEEmAL research project. In order to provide data integration and interoperability between BIM/GIS models and energy simulation tools through this platform, a District Data Model (DDM) has been devised. In this model, fields for urban sustainable regeneration (energy, social, environment, comfort, urban morphology and economic) are related to existing ontological models based on the CityGML and IFC schemas. This paper discusses how the semantic representation from IFC and CityGML files with different levels of detail can be integrated to obtain consistent description of the district in the proposed district data model